Very large digital images are relatively common in a number of areas. For example, remote sensing, meteorology, geology, and astronomy all rely on and generate very large images. For instance, a global map of the earth's vegetation can be greater than 100 gigabytes in size. The creation of these large images may be performed by collaging relatively small images through a mapping of the input images into the output image space with a merge of the overlapping areas. Traditionally, this collaging process may rely on several nodes in a computing system to perform the process, but the information generated by each node is written to the file system and then read from the file system by other nodes to perform a subsequent step. This intermediate writing and reading of data to the file system memory heavily relies on high I/O bandwidth central storage and redundant I/O operations, both of which limit the scalability of the process.